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I am just commencing a PhD in Psychology looking at children's understanding of semantic relations and how this relates to their understanding of analogy. My first problem is how to choose the relations which we should look at. For example, previous research has looked at relations such as 'part of', 'lives in', 'is made of', etc. But I don't simply want to pick the first relations that come in to my head.

Can you recommend any books, papers or other resources which attempt to list and categorise relations in a meaningful way? Several authors appear to have demonstrated how most relations can be put in to five or six basic categories, however, this tends to end up with quite abstract categories which aren't suitable for tasks with children. What I really need is something which categorises and organises relations in a more fine grained way.

We are looking for a large word frequency list for English which distinguishes parts of speech. We're currently using counts from an automatically-tagged corpus of 50 million words of AP newswire text, but this isn't enough to reliably distinguish counts of moderately infrequent words, especially for inflected forms like past participles.

Does anyone know of any large, POS-tagged corpus of American English, or a list of word frequency counts from such a corpus? We're more concerned about size than balance; a very large list from a single source (such as newswire text) would be fine.